La bora — The Bora

Trieste, May–June 1945: the forty days

On May 1, 1945, units of the Yugoslav army and partisans entered Trieste, ahead of the Western Allies; New Zealand troops of the British Eighth Army arrived the following day. For about forty days, until an agreement between Yugoslavia and the Allies in June, the city was under Yugoslav administration, before the Allies took over the city and the Yugoslavs withdrew behind a demarcation line. Those weeks are remembered in sharply different ways, and the course states the facts and leaves the judgment to the reader. During the Yugoslav administration, thousands of people in Trieste and the surrounding region were arrested; many were deported or killed, some of them in the karst sinkholes known as foibe. For many Italian Triestines, the forty days are remembered as a time of fear and violence. For many Slovenes, the end of the war meant liberation from fascism — whose regime had banned Slovene from schools and public life and Italianized names — and from German occupation. Historians continue to research and debate the numbers and the interpretation, and both countries commemorate these years in their own ways. Ada's mother and her Slovene neighbor are both, in this sense, the city. A novel that refuses to take sides between them is doing what much of Trieste's literature has tried to do: hold more than one memory at once. Alex's job is to carry that balance into English without tipping it.